Everything Inside

by Edwidge Danticat

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She nodded, and he reluctantly walked away.

  She leaned back in her chair and glanced up at the stars. When it looked like she wasn’t going, I stayed behind to keep her company.

  “I thought they’d have a huge wedding,” I said.

  “It’s hard to plan one of those in two days,” she said, smiling at last. “Besides, I think they’ve always wanted it funny and sweet.”

  A round of lightning sparked across the water, far beyond the beach. Callie leaned forward to have a look at where it was coming from, but no thunder followed. There was no sign of a moon, either, which made both the lightning and the stars seem much more dazzling.

  “Did you ever think of running for prime minister yourself?” I asked Callie, once the lightning stopped.

  I remembered seeing an online interview, which was taped at one of the island’s television stations, where she was asked that same question soon after her husband became prime minister. She’d seemed annoyed by it, sighing loudly, clenching her jaw, then fidgeting in her chair.

  “Given what happened to my father, you surely could see why that job would personally have little appeal for me,” she’d said.

  “Right now, I’d rather be known as the rising man’s wife than the late and great man’s daughter,” she told me by the pool that night.

  “Are these your only choices?” I asked.

  “Maybe they’re the only ones I’m allowing myself,” she said.

  “What about your mother? What does she think about that?” I asked.

  “You have no idea how much my mother has sacrificed,” she snapped, jerking her head toward me. But her anger seemed aimed not necessarily at me, or at least not entirely.

  We watched the animated silhouettes of the bride and groom and the wedding guests around the bonfire. From where we were sitting, Finance and the Runner looked like their two heads were shared by one body, in spite of the contrast in their black and white clothes. The wind carried their laughter to us, along with the voice of a female family member recalling how Finance and the Runner had met at a party at her house and how they’d broken up for a time when the Runner was competing abroad, then had gotten back together again.

  “After my father was assassinated, everyone left us behind,” Callie said, drowning out the family member’s voice. “They got on their chartered planes and they left us behind.”

  “Why did they leave you behind?” I asked.

  “Maybe fear. Maybe they thought we had other means of getting off the island. I don’t know. All that matters is they left us behind.”

  Laughter rose again from the beach, above the sound of the waves; then from a slightly muffled distance, we heard her husband begin his bonfire toast. “May your love,” he said, “always burn as bright as this fire tonight.”

  “Hear! Hear!” the others echoed.

  “After she picked me up from school, we couldn’t go back to the residence to get anything because we didn’t know what was waiting there,” Callie said. “So my mother went to the airport and begged to be allowed on a plane. We didn’t even have money for the ticket.”

  “May your passion remain as hot as this fire tonight,” Greg continued.

  “The man who gave Mummy the tickets and the papers to get on the plane? He made her go to a back room with him before he gave them to her,” Callie said. Her voice was clipped, her tone forceful. “I had to sit outside that room. I had to listen to him moan and moan and moan. At some point I opened the door. He was on top of her.”

  “May you walk through fire even hotter than this for each other,” Greg said. “May your love remain an eternal flame.”

  “I was going to run in and shove him off,” Callie said. “Off her, I mean. But Mummy saw me standing in the doorway. She motioned with one hand, just one hand, for me to wait. I did what she told me. I waited, because somehow I knew that, as soon as that was over, we’d be able to leave. There were all these rumors circulated about that moment, though. The story people told is that it was me. They say the man sat me on his lap and touched me everywhere while my mother watched. They said that was the price for getting on the plane.”

  The bonfire began to fizzle on the beach, the flames dimming. Suddenly I felt as though I were standing on a vast fault line, one between her and everyone else at that wedding. The difference between her and them was as stark as the gulf between those who’d escaped a catastrophe unscathed and others who’d been forever mutilated by it.

  “You see,” she told me. “No story is ever complete.”

  * * *

  —

  On Three Kings’ Eve, my parents used to make me leave my shoes by my bedroom door for an angel to fill with rolls of hair ribbons while I slept. Before I went to sleep, they would tell me about a bad decision made by this angel, who they said looked like whoever is the most beautiful woman I know. This angel had been asked by the Three Kings to join them on their journey to bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the baby Jesus, and for some reason, she had turned them down. The angel regrets her decision to this day, my mother said, which is why she brings small presents to children on the eve of Three Kings’ Day.

  After we met, I wanted to be her angel and give Callie all my ribbons. Somehow I sensed that something about her needed to be bundled and held tight. Maybe she still needed to be bundled and held tight. Maybe that’s why she’d held on to those ribbons for so long.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, I got up early to watch the sun rise over the beach in Maafa. At dawn, it looked as though clouds were pouring liquid gold into the surrounding headlands and cliffs, as well as into the sea. The flour-white sand turned the color of margarine. This, I realized, was one of the golden beaches Callie had been remembering when we were seven years old.

  * * *

  —

  We left Finance and the Runner to their honeymoon in Maafa and returned to the residence just in time to catch the final moments of the island’s archbishop’s Three Kings’ Day blessing, a favor which was apparently granted yearly at Mrs. Morrissete’s request. Mrs. Morrissete was wearing a mauve Chanel jacket with a black bouclé skirt. She was clutching a rosary and kept her head lowered as she followed the archbishop throughout the first floor, while he sprinkled holy water and singsonged his blessings and prayers.

  Out of the chaos of life, the archbishop said, would come peace over this house and all those who dwelled in it.

  The archbishop walked over to Callie and Greg and drizzled their bowed heads with holy water as well. Then before leaving, he blessed Mrs. Morrissete, who blessed herself abundantly, crossing herself three times with her eyes squeezed tight.

  * * *

  —

  Mrs. Morrissete had lunch prepared for the four of us. It was laid out beautifully on the rosewood table under the canopy on the roof. The lunch included a curried pork stew that I could barely eat because I kept looking at Mrs. Morrissete, meeting anew the now more apparent sorrow buried under her hesitant smile.

  “How was the wedding?” she asked Callie.

  “Beautiful,” Callie said.

  “Did anyone cry?” she asked Greg.

  “Buckets,” he said, though I hadn’t noticed.

  “I will never forget how kind your family was to us in New York,” she told me. “Please be sure to give your parents my warmest regards.”

  Dessert was the galette des rois, the kings’ cake that my parents also liked to have on Three Kings’ Day. The tiny brown baby Jesus, nestled in the inner layers and linings for any lucky celebrant to find, ended up on my plate, and when I found it, I squealed like I always have, as though I were still a little girl.

  Callie and Greg had an official Three Kings’ Day parade to attend and were in a hurry to leave. I was going with them.

  �
��Mummy, will you come?” Callie asked hesitantly as though she already knew what the answer would be.

  Mrs. Morrissete shook her head no.

  Callie lingered with her a bit after kissing her goodbye. Then as Greg and I were waiting by the elevator, Callie and her mother got up and walked over to the cabanas. They moved together to the glass railing, both clinging tightly to the top. As they took in the view of the old and new cities, and of the buildings and the sea, they turned their faces back and forth, their gaze lingering on some things, while quickly moving past others. It seemed to me, at that moment, that together they were watching over the entire island, as though they were its last sentinels.

  Without Inspection

  It took Arnold six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet. During that time, an image of his son, Paris, flashed before his eyes: Paris, dressed in his red school-uniform shirt and khakis the day of his kindergarten graduation. That morning, Paris’s mother, Darline, had skipped around the apartment changing dresses, as if she were the one graduating. Closing his eyes tightly as the hot wind he was plunging through battered his face, Arnold saw Paris at the classroom ceremony. He saw himself, too, standing next to Darline, who had finally chosen a billowing sapphire-colored satin dress. He was in the one black suit he wore to everything, to weddings and to funerals.

  One reason not to own too many things was their crammed two-bedroom apartment, but the other, at least for him, had to do with never wanting to feel bound. To be attached to a few people was fine—to Paris and to Darline, who were as much a part of him as his blood was—but he never wanted to be tied to things, to clothes and shoes gathering dust in packed closets, to a fancy car that required hefty payments every month. No, it was simpler to be free. As free as this fall, which he had neither intended nor chosen, this dive that had resulted from his left foot slipping off the scaffold and his body sliding out of his either loosened or broken safety harness, as though a wrathful hand had pulled the straps off him, tipped him on his side, and tossed him into the air. Then his body, attempting to regain some control, had corrected the angle at which he had begun falling, so that he was now plummeting headfirst toward the ground, which was not yet concrete but dirt and soil, from which weeds, bushes, and flowers had been plucked to make way for a forty-eight-story hotel.

  He was still falling, faster by the second. The wind felt increasingly resistant, each gust a hard blue veil to pierce through, even as the ground rose to meet him. His body veered farther left, and directly below him was an open cement-mixer chute, attached to a truck, the kind that had always looked like a spaceship to him.

  He’d been looking down at the cement truck a few hours earlier as he sat on the scaffold platform eating his breakfast. Darline liked him to eat at home with her and Paris, but he was always in too much of a hurry to do it, except on the rare Saturdays and Sundays when neither of them had to work. During the week, he drove her to the Haitian restaurant where she was a cook, then he dropped Paris off at school. By the time he got to the construction site, he had just a couple of minutes to buy a guava pastry and a cup of coffee from the Lopez brothers’ food truck.

  What enterprising guys the Lopez brothers were. Only five years earlier, they’d arrived from Cojímar on a raft made from a refitted 1950s Chevy, and look at them now. The Lopez brothers’ raft story, which he’d once heard them tell to another Cuban while he was waiting for his breakfast, had reminded him of his own landing, which was oh so different from theirs.

  Darline had been the only person sitting on the beach in the predawn light the morning that he, nine other men, and four women were ditched in the middle of the sea and told by the captain to swim ashore. The sea was relatively calm that morning. As Arnold got closer to the beach, he also noticed the towering buildings, the tall glass edifices he’d always heard about.

  All four women had drowned. They could not swim. Their bodies might eventually wash up on the beach, just as his did, except that he was still alive. Some of the men who had been on the boat with him were alive, too. They lay on the beach and tried to convince themselves, by digging their heels and toes into the sand, that they were no longer moving. He, on the other hand, just sat there looking at her. He did not want to walk over to her and frighten her away. He stank, and he was certain that the patchy beard he’d grown on the trip made him look menacing. She was staring back at him. Then he heard the sirens and he began pleading.

  “Ede m”—help me—he mouthed. He did not want to be detained or returned. He wanted to stay. He needed to stay, and he was hoping to stay with her. She could have been anybody—whoever happened to be on the beach that morning and was willing to help him. But he was happy that it was her. Somehow, it felt as though they had a rendezvous, planned by someone neither of them knew.

  The sirens jolted her and she got up and came over and took his arm, so that if the police did arrive as they were walking away together they might both be arrested or both be ignored, but whatever happened to one would surely happen to the other—because to anyone who was looking at them they appeared to be a couple, one of whom was soaking wet.

  As they walked toward the parking lot, leaving the other men, still dazed and baffled, behind them, he heard a few of them shout out to her, but she did not look back. He followed her lead and didn’t look back, either, even as some of them called his name.

  One of the men yelled, “Your wife was waiting here for you, huh?”

  Another, “Please don’t leave us here.”

  Two of them tried to follow, but quickly gave up. Darline was walking too fast, and the men were tired. He, too, would have been trailing behind if she were not supporting him. She leaned in and said quietly, “An n ale, an n ale”—let’s go—and sped up.

  Her small white car was covered with dents and scratches. He forgot that he was wet until she passed him the towel she’d been sitting on at the beach. He shook the sand off it before placing it on the front passenger seat.

  “If you’d stayed, they would have taken you to Krome,” she said.

  He had no idea what or where Krome was.

  “It’s a prison for people like us,” she said.

  Us? What did she mean by “us”? Was this her way of telling him that she’d also come by boat? Had she been imprisoned in this place, Krome?

  He wanted to ask her a dozen questions. He wanted to know why she had chosen him. Why rescue him and not the others? At least three more could have fit into the back seat of her car. But, more than curious, he was thirsty. So very thirsty.

  Just as he was now, as he was falling.

  He’d learned, while at sea, that time can stretch endlessly and that wind and air can suck you dry, forcing you to see what is not there. They had run out of clean water halfway through the trip from Port-de-Paix, on the northern coast of Haiti, and had had to drink seawater or their own urine. A trip that was supposed to take at most two days had actually taken four, because the captain kept changing course and once even changed speedboats to avoid run-ins with the US Coast Guard.

  Before he could ask for water, she reached into the back seat and handed him a bottle from a pack of more than a dozen. If the police hadn’t arrived, with their helicopters, cruisers, ambulances, and dogs, he might have taken some of that water to the people he’d left behind on the beach.

  The police dogs he heard barking, she told him, were cadaver dogs. They were released on the beach to find corpses that might be hidden from view, because for every person who made it to shore maybe five others died. Why hadn’t he dived back into the sea to rescue the others? Or at least dragged some of the corpses out? His own hunger and thirst, the weakness in his legs, had made him fear drowning if he went in again; his fear of being caught had made him crazy, or selfish.

  He drank the water so fast it nearly choked him. She took the empty bottle and handed him another full one. He drank that, too.

  “Wh
ere should I take you?” she asked him.

  This was a service she provided, he realized. She was a volunteer chauffeur for boat people. Later, she would tell him that she’d done this for seventeen others, including women and children.

  He now felt doubly sorry for the people he’d left behind, men and women he’d barely known when they embarked in Port-de-Paix, but with whom he’d grown familiar during the journey as they’d watched one another become both homesick and seasick, shrinking to sunburned skin and protruding bones. These other survivors would now have to confront their grief and the immigration police. Most, if not all, of them would be sent back. She had saved him from that.

  “Ou grangou?” she asked him, once the water she gave him had diluted all the salt water in his stomach.

  Before he could answer, she pulled over into a fast-food drive-through and ordered him two bags of food. Although it was the first food he had eaten in this country, he would never again enjoy breakfast burritos. He ate six of them, and then he threw up in the restroom of the fast-food place.

  After he had cleaned himself up, they sat in her car in the parking lot, trying to figure out what to do next.

  “I never take anyone to my home with me,” she told him.

  He hoped that this meant she was making an exception, because, now that he had eaten and was no longer thirsty, he looked her over carefully and found her body, which was both long and shapely, as pleasing as her face.

  “There’s a shelter…” She started driving again without finishing her sentence.

  She took him to a church shelter, where he met some men like him, men who’d come on boats from Haiti, the Bahamas, and Cuba. He’d learned Spanish from the Dominicans he’d worked for as a stock boy on the border and picked up some turns of phrase and idioms from the shelter Cubans, who eventually helped him get the job on the construction site.